Join The Team

Join The Team

West is looking for pleasant, talented, hard working people to join us. We have a couple specific positions we’d like to fill immediately and we have a range of other positions that we’d like to fill when we find the right people.

In all cases, you may want to know a bit about the work environment and with whom you’ll be working. If so, jump to the bottom of the page for a quick summary.

As Soon As We Find the Right Person…

Web Developer

West builds and manages websites on behalf of many of its clients. Demand for those services is growing and we need to enhance our in-house team.

Currently, our highest need is someone who can help code the backend of websites for auto dealerships, which involves merging data feeds from various sources and ensuring the information presents accurately in a user-friendly and reliable manner.

We’re looking for a creative and efficient developer who is familiar with PHP, MySQL, and building custom Wordpress templates based on responsive frameworks. Experience wth multiple data-feed formats and administering Apache servers via command line would be a plus. You’ll be working primarily with four other individuals who play various roles in each website development project.

In addition to websites, we have some API and application projects that we’d like to handle in-house, if possible.

A Bit About West

The agency opened in 1988. That’s an eternity in the world of small- to medium-sized agencies. However, we’ve thrived through a blend of enthusiasm for our work and a progressive approach to evolving along with the industry. While we remain committed to traditional media channels, we’ve become quite strong in digital channels and how to blend the two.

Most importantly, we enjoy working together and we have a great group of loyal clients. Our longest tenured employee just celebrated 20 years with the agency and we have clients who have been with us even longer. Fortunately, we have a plenty of new clients and are looking for new employees.

The work environment can be described as “deceptively laid-back”. It’s comfortable space and the people are upbeat and friendly. Lots of blue jeans, an office cat, and a great deal of personal freedom and involvement in the direction of the agency. However, those looking for a casual place to just hangout might be confused by the focus of the team. We are highly dependent upon one another and driven to provide a very high level of support to our co-workers. Nobody slacks. Our expectations for ourselves are much higher than those to which our clients hold us, but that is what has made us succeed over three decades of tremendous change in our industry. We do not work super long hours like many ad agencies or high-tech firms, but we’re productive while we’re here.

Another characteristic that falls under the “deceptively laid-back” label is our strict adherence to systems. We’ve learned through our mistakes and don’t like to make the same ones twice. That has taught us an appreciation for quickly developing processes and procedures to make our work lives easier, more efficient, and far less prone to errors. We view following systems as a path to liberation. If you see it as oppressive, you won’t be happy here. That being said, we’re very open minded about abandoning obsolete procedures, but not until we’ve developed better ones to replace them.

Currently, our client base is heavily skewed toward large auto dealerships and dealership groups. We’ve had many clients from a very wide range of other industries, but West is viewed as a highly qualified specialist in the retail automotive sector and a lot of that work comes our way. The great benefit of working with auto dealerships is that they provide us with work in just about every known media channel and are very open to new ideas.

The future is pretty wide open. We don’t consider ourselves to be locked into the strict definition of an ad agency. We have some projects that go well beyond the standard definition and we expect to stray even further with time. Specifically, we see some opportunities and may ultimately be our own client for a few projects.

Lastly, we hire people not positions. There are times that we have a position that needs filling and that position has certain responsibilities, but we’re fairly organic in how we define each person’s long term role. As long as the primary responsibilities are being addressed, we can talk about expansion into other areas of interest.